A female doctor has been axed to death by a patient in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin in the latest act of violence in the country's hospitals.

Kang Hongqian, 47, was attacked and killed in her clinic on the second floor of the No 1 Hospital, which is affiliated to the Tianjin University of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

Ms Kang was the head of the hospital's acupuncture department and on duty at the time. Her murder is one of a wave of thousands of attacks in recent years by patients who are frustrated at China's health care system.

There was no clear motive for the attack, and the assailant, who has not been named, jumped out of a window afterwards, injuring himself seriously.

Wang Hongdong, the hospital's chief spokesman, said the man had smuggled in the axe after lunch, when security guards and doctors were on a break. He added that the hospital had increased its security this year, in line with new directives from the health ministry.

"He arrived around 1pm and some people saw him, but thought he was a patient. He came straight to the second floor and he looked perfectly normal all the way.

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"He has been treated at the psychiatric department of the hospital before and is suffering from depression. He has also been treated at the acupuncture department twice and has never complained to the hospital before."

Mr Wang said he did not think the attack was driven by revenge. "Dr Kang has always had a good reputation with her patients. She had breast cancer last year and had just come back from a course of chemotherapy."

He added that the man had been taken to another hospital for emergency treatment after his jump and is now in a stable condition.

Despite an injection of more than £150 billion into the Chinese health system in the past three years, the frustration of Chinese patients is growing rapidly.

Doctors are underpaid and overworked and rely on selling medicine or extra fees in order to make money. Patients are charged high prices for treatment in what is supposed to be a public health care system.

In July, 17-year-old Li Mengnan was convicted of murder after stabbing four hospital staff to death in a hospital in Harbin. However, he received a surprising amount of public support for his drastic act, with two-thirds of respondents to a poll on the People's Daily website sympathising with him.

In 2010, there were more than 17,000 "incidents" aimed at hospital staff, up from 10,000 five years earlier and the Lancet, a medical journal, has pronounced that "China's doctors are in crisis".

A letter to the journal from a Chinese medical student, Li Jie, said "the deteriorating relationship between doctors and patients has turned medical practice in China into a high-risk job".

In September 2011, a 54-year-old cancer patient stabbed a doctor 17 times after an argument. In April this year, Chen Yuna, a doctor in Hunan province was stabbed 28 times in the neck, chest and stomach by Wang Yunsheng, a 25-year-old migrant worker with drug-resistant tuberculosis.